Performing Keyword Research for Your Website and Blog
- Posted: June 17, 2010 by Stacey Abler/ Last modified: June 17, 2010
Thanks for visiting the site again. If you are looking for professional writing for your business, please contact me.
Blindly writing content for your site without researching keywords can result in content that does not draw visitors to your site. Properly keyword researched and well written content can increase your rankings in search engines, make those searching are more likely to click and pull them further into your site by delivering content relevant to their search.
One of the easiest ways to conduct keyword research is through the Google Adwords Tool.
You have two options to search: keyword/phrase or website. I typically focus on the keyword/phrase tool though I will put in my own website and websites I view as competition to see what keywords pop up for them.
Enter a keyword to search for and check “use synonyms”. Note: I used the old keyword tool instead of the new beta version.
Let’s start with the most identifiable keyword for your business. For this example, I am going to use one of my other websites and search for “army wife”.
As you can see, “army wife” has more than 70K searches but there are very few army wife phrases that could also be used. However, Google also suggests additional keywords that may be used in the next chart, as seen below.
You can see from this above that “army national guard” has over 300K searches. If you want to break into that market, you will likely have some very stiff competition. It will be easier to break into some of the keywords with a lesser number of searches as well as less advertising competition (and therefore website competition).
If you are doing this in a real life scenario, you would continue to drill down by researching additional similar keywords until you find the right mix for your keyword, advertiser competition and number of searches.
Let’s assume from this research, we decide to target the keywords “army wife” from our original search, as well as “army information” from the recommended keyword lists. The next task is to develop content based on these keywords, which I will be covering in the next post.
A few other notes before we close this one out.
1. Each article or blog post should concentrate on three to five keywords or keyword phrases. Phrases are better. With the example above, targeting “army” would be very difficult to ever get any real search engine love. However, narrow that down to “army wife shirts” and now you have the possibility to rise to the top.
2. Google Adwords is not the only keyword research tool. There are other options, including paid options. However, Google is generally the first go-to website for keyword research.
3. Develop a list of keywords that you would like to rank highly for with your website. Focus on what customers would be looking for, not what you think they should be looking for when searching. Search out those keywords and look at who ranks. Examine their pages, view their source code and attempt to determine their own keyword strategy to figure out how to outsmart them and outrank them in the search engines.
Related posts: